Biographical Notes: Dickens
had a happy early childhood near the sea in Chatham, where his father, John,
was a Navy pay office clerk. Following a series of financial setbacks
due in large part to John Dickens's extravagance and improvidence, the family
ended up in London, where for several months John and all the family but Charles
were imprisoned in the Marshalsea debtor's prison. While his family lived
in the prison and for several months after, 12-year-old Charles supported himself
and his family by working in a shoe-blacking factory pasting labels on bottles.
This early experience with poverty and social degradation had a profound lifelong
influence on Dickens, and much of his life and fiction seems a clear reaction
against the horrors of this year-long period in the blacking factory.
After intermittent schooling, Dickens was apprenticed as a law clerk.
He learned shorthand and became a reporter of court proceedings; later he became
a parliamentary reporter. He also published a series of fictional sketches
(Sketches by Boz, 1836-37) which were received with enthusiasm.
Close after, the overwhelming popularity of The Pickwick Papers (1836-37)
quickly established Dickens as a major novelist. From 1837 until his death
and beyond, Dickens reigned supreme as the world's most popular novelist.
In 1858 Dickens endured scandal when he separated from his wife, Catherine,
with whom he had ten children, and set up a house for his 18-year-old mistress,
the actress Ellen Ternan. In his final years Dickens gave a series of
exhausting public readings, which together with his continued writing and the
management of his weekly magazine All the Year Round led to a fatal stroke
in 1870.

Mixed reaction, then and now
From his time to ours, critics have tried to condemn
Dickens as a "mere entertainer"not someone to be regarded as
a serious literary artist by scholars and serious readers. In part, the
sheer persistence of Dickens's popularityhe still sells well in commercial
bookstores, and of course he figures prominently on the college syllabusthis
persistent popularity is reinforced by some scholars who see Dickens as a great
natural genius and conscious artist in fiction despite his undeniable commercialism.
[Consistently the 20th century determined that popularity is the "artist's"
greatest nightmare.] Several decades of renewed attention to the symbolism,
the social commentary, and the narrative technique in Dickens's later novels
has allowed him a measure of critical respectability he did not enjoy in the
first 40 years of the 20th century. To me, the dispute over Dickens's
relative "artistic merit" boils down to each individual's personal
reaction to Dickens: some people are charmed by his humor and his peculiarly
"Dickensian" language and wildly eccentric characters, others are
not. Those who believe that art must always be serious and preferably
"realistically negative" or pessimistic; or that "real art"
must be too complex for non-academic readers to enjoywell, . . . these
people don't think much of Dickens.

Dickens under fire: frequent criticismsHis
books were too popular to be really any goodhe catered to the public instead
of adhering to a personal sense of artistic integrity.Too
sentimentaltoo often overtly appealing to the emotions: tears, anger,
laughter.Too
sensationalnovels depict unrealistic extremes in life.Too
melodramaticgood characters are too good, bad characters are too "bad."Too
much coincidence in his intricate plotsplots are not plausible, sometimes
not neatly unified, characters introduced "as needed."Characters
are not realistic, especially women and the more eccentric minor characters.His
books are too openly polemicalthat is, he often tells the reader what
to think instead of allowing the characters and events speak for themselves.

Serial publication
Before they were issued as bound books, Dickens's novels
were published in weekly or monthly installments, often in Dickens's own magazines
(Household Words until 1859, subsequently All the Year Round.Great Expectations was published serially in weekly installments in All the Year Round). Serial publication explains in part the "cliffhanger"
endings to many of Dickens's chapters, and too, it may explain Dickens's tendency
to draw such extravagantly eccentric characters. Often, readers had to
keep up with a dizzying array of characters in the novels over a period of 18
or 19 months: the more outlandish the characters, the easier they were to recall.

Comedic techniques
Influenced largely by the popular theater of his
day, Dickens's two main strategies of humor are caricature and farce, two forms
of exaggeration. Typically, his comic characters are given specific exaggerated
traits or speech-characteristics ("tags") that by force of repetition
may be funny (e.g. Wemmick's "aged P" and Mrs. Joe's saying "bring you up by hand" in Great Expectations]. Farce involves exaggeration not of characteristics
but of action (Bitzer's definition of "horse," e.g., in Hard Times).

Social criticism
Through satire, irony, and outright didacticism and rhetorical
declamation, most of Dickens's novels take aim at particular aspects or institutions
of Victorian society: workhouse reforms in Oliver Twist, Chancery courts
in Bleak House, prisons in Little Dorrit, America in Martin
Chuzzlewit, and Utilitarianism in Hard Times, for instance.

Themes and motifs to consider in Great Expectations: Various characters' "expectations" of different sorts Family relations and responsibilities Relations between men and women The definition of "gentleman" Social structure and class differences; the value of work? Crime and punishment Guilt The law and the legal profession The novel as a bildungsroman (novel of maturation or coming-of-age novel) Humor? Comedy? Psychological realism? Especially relating to children? Concentrated focus on orphans or abandoned children Contemporary relevance of the novel today Autobiographical elements: Dickens himself in Great Expectations Melodrama:
extremes of good and evil; sentimentality Depiction of women